Industry Summary Articles

One of the most exciting new capabilities in Smart Manufacturing (SM) and Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPS) is the provisioning of manufacturing services as unbundled "apps or services," which could be significantly more flexible and less expensive to use than the current generation of monolithic manufacturing applications. However, bundling and integrating heterogeneous services in the form of such apps or composite services is not a trivial job. There is a need for service vendors, cloud vendors, manufacturers, and other stakeholders to work collaboratively to simplify the effort to "mix-and-match" and compose the apps or services.

Background

This workshop is the third in the series of smart manufacturing workshops organized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Open Applications Group Inc. (OAGi) to address technology and standards needs for easier discovery and easier integration of services based on improved interoperability and composability. Joining the organizers again this year is the SM & CPPS Special Interest Group (SIG), recently established under the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) WG 5.7, Advances in Production Management Systems.

At the first Open Cloud Architecture for Smart Manufacturing workshop, the attendees recognized that open cloud service ecosystems provide a promising new platform to advance innovations in manufacturing production and supply chain management. Yet, they also identified and prioritized a number of standards and technology issues that hinder the adoption of the new innovation platform. Participants indicated the need to close the gaps and overlaps among standards, and the need to simplify and assist in the use of standards and SM technologies, as top issues.

At the second Drilling down on Smart Manufacturing -- Enabling Composable Apps workshop, the attendees started work to address the identified top issues within five working sessions. The first three working sessions were focused on the analysis, methods, and tools to address those top issues. The sessions include SM model-based standards development, Standards capability analysis for SM, and SM systems characterization. The other two sessions looked into realizing the innovation platform. The sessions include SM apps and service marketplaces and Crowdsourcing of manufacturing knowledge.

Call for participation:

This year's workshop will continue work within the five working sessions initiated last year.  The plan is for this year to complete the identified goals, capability gaps, and needed technology descriptions for each of the sessions.  In addition, the sessions will propose one or more priority roadmap topics to be addressed by the community, based on the interests and commitment from the community to work on these topics.  Based on the previous year’s workshop results, we have identified a common topic across the sessions to be reference models, as key enabler to the capabilities leading to Service-Oriented Manufacturing.   Therefore, this year’s sessions will be focused on the topic of reference models and their life-cycle management, enabling composable Service-Oriented Manufacturing (SOM) systems.  It is expected each session will take its own perspective on this topic and lead towards creating priority roadmap topics.

The workshop will consist of an opening plenary where the session chairs present objectives and planned work for their sessions, parallel working sessions where the participants discuss the existing and propose new material towards defining focus of the future community effort within priority roadmap topics, and a closing plenary where the session chairs present the results from the breakout sessions. Each session will have its specific focus and an agenda that will be formulated and announced by the session chairs. Please direct your interests and session-specific questions to the respective session chairs indicated below.

Interested professionals and researchers are invited to submit short statements including their positions on these workshop topics, contribute their materials, and share technical insights. Please contact the session chairs and copy the workshop chairs, indicating your intention to participate and/or submit your position contributions. The results from the workshop will be published as a compendium of reports from working sessions as contributed by session chairs.

For more information or to register visit: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/events/2017/04/2017-nistoagi-workshop-enabling-composable-service-oriented-manufacturing